Monday, September 26, 2016

Something super exciting happened this week, so I'm going to
share it first and upfront!!

Last week we were housing really late, and we were almost
going to go home, but we decided to house one more apartment. We met someone
who actually let us talk. He had even read the bible, which is so rare in
Japan! We were able to give him a Book of Mormon, and we were SO STOKED after!
We were shouting "WE FOUND A KINJIN! WE FOUND A KINJIN!" all the way
home!

We visited him the again a few days later, and this is how
the conversation went:

"So we gave you that Book of Mormon last week, have you
had a chance to read it?"

"Oh yeah, I'm half way though, I really like it."

WHAT?!

HALF WAY???? In a matter of DAYS????

This is one of those stories you hear about where it's like
"My cousin's uncle's brother's son's friend heard this story about a
missionary who..." But it really happened! In my life!

And what's even better, is after we taught him the second
lesson, he agreed to be baptized!

Here's how that went:

"If you come to know this message is true, will you
receive baptism?"

"Yeah."

HUH, REALLY????

"Great!"

"I'm just going to have to get rid of all of this
Buddhist stuff my friend gave me first."

OKAY!!

He came to church this week, and seemed to really love it!
He seems so happy. He said to us that he has been depressed recently, so bad
that he can't hold a job. He has a terrible relationship with his family, and
he's divorced. He really needs this message.

I'm glad we housed that last apartment, and didn't go home
early. We really made a difference in
his life. If all goes well, he will be
baptized the end of October! One of us will transfer by then, so I might not
get to be there, but that's alright!

So this week has been pretty great!

Not to mention we also were treated to lunch by a
missionary's parents!! He was taking his parents on a tour of his mission, so
they stopped by and took us to the NUMBER ONE LEGENDARY RESTAURANT among the
Japan Sapporo Mission: BISTARAI BISTARAI!

Every day is Car-Free Day for missionaries. As our noble
Zone Leader says, "Get Excited!"

He is also commonly quoted as saying
"Yaaaaaaayyyy." (You can find Noble Zone Leader in the picture at
Bistarai Bistarai in the bottom right. It's like where's Waldo, but you're not
finding Waldo, so I guess it's actually nothing like where's Waldo.)

Haha and he just said from the other room of the church:
"AUGH, what happened to the wiffy?? (He means wifi)" And now he's
whining no. "Nooooooooooooo."

Ah, missionary life.

A picture from some meeting with my Zone and The Mission
President! I don't know what the meeting is actually called, because they said
it in Japanese. Yaaaaay! Look how precious Sister Doesn't Like Pictures looks
hiding behind me. We're buddies.

Also I love how I'm front and center.

Not.

Look at the discomfort in my face.

You can practically hear me screaming on the inside.

This week after church (and the extra hour of meetings for
the Halloween Party, which I will probably be transferred before happens)
someone gave us food to eat! We were so hungry! We were so happy. We bite into
our rice balls only to find....

THIS. This is a sac of fish eggs.

Not just the fish eggs, no. They were nice enough to put in
the whole SAC! Delightful!

I didn't eat it.

I made potato soup from a powdered mix instead.

This is a picture of me eating my soup, uncomfortably close
to fish organs.

There's a drink called C.C. Lemon which apparently has 55
lemons worth of Vitamin C in it.

Anyway, the packaging was just waiting to be used for a
photo opp. This is what we call シャッターチャンス / shataachansu in Japanese,
taken transliterally from the apparently English phrase "shutter
chance."

This week we had splits with the new Sister Training Leader,
Sister Not Australian, But Eats Vegemite! She's super cute and nice! This is
the joke she said this week:

(Backstory) So I had a dream about this clementine cake that
looked really yummy so I woke up one morning and made it, and upon hearing
this, she replied...

"What, are you Lehi????"

You know, because Lehi had a prophetic dream and.... Yeah,
it's a Sister Missionary joke, I know! But it's still funny!

Anyway, back to the story about splits!

My companion had already left the apartment before we were
ready to head out, but they left.... With the keys! So we couldn't leave!

BUT WE WEREN'T JUST GOING TO SIT THERE, OH NO!

WE WOULD DO ANYTHING FOR THE WORK!!

I attached a stick to the door with a rope so we could lock
the door from the outside, without the key. If watching Cyberchase and Zoom
after school every day as a kid did anything for me, it's this.

And then we walked around by the train station to talk to
people and met some people from Switzerland speaking German! I was like
"SUMIMASEN (Japanese) ICH HABE DEUTSCH-GO (Japanese/German)
MANAB...(Japanese) Ge.... GESTUDIERT!!! UMMM UMMM"

4 years of German classes and in a matter of months all that
work has been smothered by Japanese.

Monday, September 19, 2016

We went to Furano for PDAY last week, and these are the
pictures I had promised last week!

It was pretty

Super pretty

There were flowers

Many colors of flowers

There were lots of stairs... I felt like Po from Kung Fu Panda

We tried to take jumping pictures again.

I got scared

And there was this thing.

How I felt about the whole experience.

And this was how I felt about my first Japanese shrine experience. (Overly excited.)

While at the Flower Town place, I
went to use the restroom and it was my FIRST SQUATTY POTTY EXPERIENCE! In
Japan, they sometimes have holes in the floor for toilets! It's for
cleanliness. My first experience was successful. :)

FIVE MINUTES IS UP

I’LL TELL YOU THE REST OF THIS
WEEK NEXT WEEK ALONG WITH WHAT HAPPENS NEXT WEEK.

an approximately two foot by two foot counter top right next
to the gas

stove (Japanese kitchens are tiny tiny tiny tiny tiny), and
I set down

the wooden rolling pin and apparently it was quite close the
the

flame... Because suddenly my companion was shouting fire and
throwing

the rolling pin into the sink.

I made pizza though!

In the microwave.

And we cut it with scissors!

Okay now that I've confessed, let's move on to what's really
important.

JAPAN HAS MCDONALDS.

AND THEY HAVE SHRIMP BURGERS.

Yes, you heard it here first, burgers made of shrimp. And
they are delicious!

Like one of my top ten favorite foods now.

Freaking yum.

And because it's Japan, they had cute little cartoons
everywhere. They even have a little show playing about this girl who just
started as a part time worker, haha! Oh, Japan!

As we were parking our bikes in the parking lot, a big group
of Japanese teenagers comes out and they laughed. Classic Americans, gotta get
their Big Macs! You know us too well!

Haha.

PS the french fries are exactly the same.

Today I visited my first shrine!!! It was big! It was
beautiful! It was culturally relevant! And you are going to have to wait until
next week because we took a lot of pictures and I don't want to edit them right
now. It was a long car ride back, okay??

But here's a sneak peek until then!

And if anyone wants a language update, I still can't do the
whole Japanese thing, but at least now I can read the flavors of ice cream and
don't have to choose at random!

My life has a lot less surprises now.

And with this week my first transfer comes to a close!

I can't tell if it feels long or short. I kind of take every
second as it comes, which makes it really hard to tell what day it is. It feels
like it's been one long day so far. Haha, thinking about it makes me want to
take a nap!

Actually, thinking about anything makes me want to take a
nap.

Aka I'm tired.

This week one of my favorite people we visit said we can't
come over anymore. She's a cute, spunky grandma who is a less active, and is
lonely, so she loved to talk. She would always give us snacks! But she hadn't
been sleeping recently, and her doctor said it was because of the stress from
our visits. We make her feel guilty, because she doesn't want to come back to
church. I was pretty sad, I really liked her. We're still going to write her
letters and stuff, just to tell her we love her.

After she told us that, we were pretty bummed, so we went to
a convenience store and bought fancy bread and Black Thunder candy bars. The
two best cures for any ailment, I think.

Sunday, September 4, 2016

This week I learned a lot about Japanese culture! Let me
share with you my findings.

JAPAN'S "PUBLIC ORDER"

I was talking to a ward member who had traveled to Italy,
and when I asked her how it was, she said "It was very pretty, but the 治安 was really
bad." I looked up the word 治安. It means "public order."
I laughed. Of course! The Japanese are so orderly!

They are so orderly, in fact, that this week I saw a
cleaning person cleaning leaves off the street with a tiny pair of tongues. He
was picking up individual leaves with tongues. TONGUES! Is that the right word?
Or am I spelling tongues, like the thing in your mouth... I'm kind of
forgetting how to do the English...

JAPAN'S not quite right, but still TRYING

We were over at a member's house this week teaching a lesson
to her friend, who is one of my favorite investigators, who always wears a classy
hat wherever she goes, and is basically a church member, but she hasn't been
baptized yet. She's received all the lessons, but is just putting off baptism,
because she's worried about how her husband may react. She comes to church
every week, and is such a sweetie pie. She's the one on the left!

(She's not unhappy, Japanese people just usually don't smile
in pictures because they are so classy)

ANYWAY, we had met for lunch, and the member had made us
pizza! Which was miraculously, amazingly, life-changing-ly delicious and it had
broccoli on it. But, she didn't have a pizza cutter, so she just pulled out
some scissors! My companion informed me that this is fairly normal in Japan. Cutting
slices of pizza out with scissors! I was very amused.

We went to another curry place this week with a really cool
investigator in her 20's who is the third generation of her family to be a part
of this really strict sect of Buddhism. They have to study their religious text
and take tests on it and everything! So basically seminary... But different!
She is super interesting and cute and her name means Good Smell.

But anyway, this item was on the menu! Apparently, some of
the curry they sell is invisible, but this one is not!

I love Japan.

JAPAN'S GENEROSITY

I know I've already commented on this before, but this week
we got another huge haul of groceries from a ward member and the Fruits Basket
(the food basket for missionaries at the church building.) They give us so
much, it's hazardous traveling home with that heavy of a bag of food on your
handlebars! We have to go extra slow so we don't die, haha!

This week there was a small festival in one of the towns we
have investigators in, so we were stopped at a light when a group of children
in festival clothing, chanting "RASSHAI!" in unison as they carried
the... Thing they carry... (I don't know the word for it, but it's like a small
version of a shrine that is on two poles so a big group can carry it around.)
The adult who was leading the procession said, "Everyone, the foreigners
are watching, so do your best!"

So funny!

Last week's P-Day we went to a fun park and acted like
children for a few hours. Well, I guess we always act like children, but we
were only at the park for a few hours...

It was beautiful!

Just a city girl.

Just a taste of what it's like to have this much hair all
the time.

This climbing thing was really hot and I almost burned my
hands.

PS, JAPAN HAS HELMET GREMLINS!

We had stopped by the church to utilize the wifi, and when
we went to our bikes, my companion's helmet had mysteriously vanished! Luckily,
we had extras back at the apartment. That was on Friday. Today, I found her
helmet hidden under the weird concrete structure right near where we park our
bikes.